If you eat the rich, wouldn't you get mercury poisoning? Heavy metals? An alien super virus? Are the people not worried about parasites and ringworm? Cannibalism isn’t chic, never has been, never will be. Luca Guadagnino and Timothée Chalamet tried to make a neo Cannibal Ferox with 2022’s Bones and All, a prettified and streamlined Hollywood take on the insane and often criminal Mondo films of the 1970s, but that movie came and went without leaving a scent; Guadagnino’s recent bomb After the Hunt may have vanished even quicker, but that, along with The Smashing Machine, had the infamy of failing spectacularly. I don’t remember much about Bones and All, just that Chalamet talked about “societal collapse” at the film’s premiere in Venice. Prescient or simply stating the obvious in the 2020s?
Another 2022 movie that’s stuck around in the popular consciousness is The Menu, written by Will Tracy and directed by Succession regular Mark Mylod. In that film, Anya Taylor-Joy and Nicholas Hoult play a bickering couple at a hyper-exclusive and ultra-chic restaurant out in the middle of the ocean. Ralph Fiennes, the long-suffering cook, kills all of his customers while enumerating the crimes, follies, and inanities of the billionaire idiots who waft in and out of his establishments without any compassion, intelligence, curiosity, or appreciation. Pretty good movie, I had a fun time, nothing exceptional, but, then, not much is. After making $80 million against a $30 million budget, The Menu took off on streaming, and it remains one of the few 2020s movies to have any kind of cultural imprint; people will be watching and talking about The Menu long after One Battle After Another.
Tracy’s follow-up, Bugonia, was originally set to be directed by Ari Aster, but thankfully he was free to make a masterpiece this year in Eddington; Yorgos Lanthimos stepped in, his third film in as many years. The Greek auteur said last week that he’s going to take a break after half a decade of non-stop work, just like at the end of the 2010s when he delivered The Lobster, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, and The Favourite back-to-back-to-back. Film snobs—the hundred or so left in the world—turned against Lanthimos at some point, and he’s fallen out of favor with the hipsters, now as uncool as… Ari Aster and Robert Eggers. It’s not the films, it’s their popularity and the burning, always unspoken jealousy that success brings out in people. Aster and Eggers are the preeminent American film directors of the Millennial generation. That’s not a value judgment, it’s just a fact. Get used to it.
Bugonia is the best of Lanthimos’ three 2020s films, even if its intimate scale suggests minor work. Most of the movie takes place inside a dingy house, where Jesse Plemmons and his disabled friend hold high-powered corporate supervillain Emma Stone captive. They’ve shaved her head and covered her in anti-histamine paste in order to prevent her from “contacting her mothership.” She’s an alien, you know. Stone doesn’t get the joke, if there is one, and she spends most of the movie acting like a typical movie kidnap victim: first threatening, then bargaining, then turning one captor against the other. There isn’t much more plot than that, nor that many characters, maybe six significant speaking parts in all. The result is Lanthimos’ most broadly accessible film: wordy, not that violent, and visually restrained, without any fisheyes (Lanthimos contents himself with super wides).
Bugonia’s VistaVision cinematography (by Robbie Ryan) is the first time I’ve been convinced of this antiquated photochemical technology, now an auteurist fad ever since the critical, if not commercial, success of Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist. I thought that film looked flat and plain; ditto One Battle After Another, the first Paul Thomas Anderson movie that didn’t at least look good. There are shots in Bugonia that echo The Searchers, thematically and compositionally: Plemons and his crony at the cruddy dinner table in their house might as well be Ward Bond and the family in their cabin. Even more than Anderson’s film, Bugonia sticks to wide shots and extreme close-ups; far from the banal chaos of the former, Bugonia’s epic visual scope serves the piece, which could be performed on the stage with little alteration.
Seeing Emma Stone in those stunning—I was stunned this time—VistaVision close-ups, you realize she’s the best actress of our generation, one of the few multi-faceted and intelligent Millennial artists. Plemons reveals new depths as well, playing a far more convincing on-the-brink radical than anyone in One Battle After Another. I can’t help it, one VistaVision movie after another forces you to compare them. Judging by recent films shot in VistaVision, it’s obvious that these cameras can’t move very much, so whatever you’re shooting better have real depth—and whoever you’re shooting better be a movie star. Stone holds you as much as Plemons makes you sick, mostly because you know this guy, and you know his situation isn’t that uncommon. Rather than signaling toward any political agenda, Bugonia concerns itself with the people embodying the times, and it’s all the better for it.
Besides a juvenile and inexplicably drawn-out closing montage, Bugonia has none of the violent misanthropy of all of Lanthimos’ previous films. As films overall grow gorier and gorier, the blood and burned limbs of Bugonia are mild to moderate. It’s Lanthimos’ funniest film in years, and far more enjoyable than his last two.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @NickyOtisSmith